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beauty isn’t everything

I really wanted to love my Misfit Shine fitness tracker when i wrote about it back in mid-September (here). At that time I had just used it a few weeks. It was beautiful and novel and had potential — potential for me to go electronic. But I am sad to say this little beauty has been a huge disappointment. So before you spend your dollars read on . . .

The issues:

syncing is a challenge. While it is supposed to sync automatically when near your iPhone’s open app, it only does so when it damn well feels like it. Manual syncing can take 6-7 attempts before it is successful.

often it doesn’t differentiate days and puts all my activity together on one day, even though it might have occurred over successive days.

customer service is slow and poor — after an app update, I just couldn’t get my misfit to sync so I contacted customer service through the app. 3 weeks later I got a response saying sometimes it just takes time to sync. After several days, the function did start working again.

the beta system for alternate exercises is very hit or miss. I chose this fitness tracker over others because it can track swimming. You are supposed to tap 3 times before starting so it recognizes you are doing your chosen alternate activity. Only there is no indication that it has recognized your taps and is a 50/50 shot whether it tracks the activity at all. And some of those times, it just tracks swimming as walking instead.

adding manual tracking (just for the above situation) was a welcome update recently. But unfortunately whatever you track manually doesn’t count towards your daily total. So what’s the point? If I forget to wear the tracker or it doesn’t record my activity due to a glitch, my day can look like a big goose egg.

the battery is supposed to last 3-4 months. I barely got 2 months out of my first battery.

so back to paper and pencil for me. I hear the newer cheaper version is a bit more responsive to touch so may sync or track alternate activities with more success. If you are eager to try, I’d try one of those. Not as pretty but you can’t have everything.